Books and Literature

[duygu]

On 01.01.2018 at 9:47 PM, CiaoCiao said:

Murakami is my love

I just finished Blind Willow Sleeping Woman of him, it's a collection of crazy tales that confused me a bit (like, all of his books) but I loved it

I look for it but it doesn't translated to my language.By the way I love Murakami's descriptions,while I reading I can directly visualize it.

[dheu]

I'm dredging this thread out of the depths of the Space Junk section, all because I want to see Yuzu's Helsinki LP but there's too many hours to go until then...  I've got to amuse myself somehow!

 

There are a lot of posts on here (from a long time ago ) about Haruki Murakami.  To be honest, I have a love-hate relationship with his books.  For instance, I love "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (it's one of my favorite books) but many of his other books I can't get into, such as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle".  I really tried with that one, but I just couldn't appreciate it, even after making it to the end.  It combined the mundane inanity of thorough descriptions of every day actions like making spaghetti (which felt like it happened every other chapter) with such bizarre situations that I couldn't follow the thread of the book.  The most memorable part of the book for me was the story told by the officer who ended up in the well, which I still remember, even though I can barely remember what the main character did throughout the book (except make spaghetti).  "Hardboiled Wonderland" was a revelation to me.  I think I was hoping "Chronicle" would be the same.

 

But I've never really been a huge fan of contemporary fiction anyway.  My tastes in books are kind of backwards.  When I was a child, I was reading books like Les Miserables, the Brothers Karamazov, and the Count of Monte Cristo.  Now that I'm an adult, I read young adult fiction.  I guess I'm just weird.  

 

 

[Hydroblade]

Since it's the literature thread i just HAVE to share yesterday's experience here...

So, we met Brandon Sanderson yesterday...

My boyfriend and i split the whole Cosmere between us and we got all the books signed! He got his favorite one personalized (with his name and "journey before destination, life before death" and "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves").

A bunch of amazing things happened to him, but i think the cherry on top was that he got a RAFO (Read And Find Out) card after he asked Brandon something while he was signing the book. When we got out of the library a lot of people went to him to ask him what question he had asked.

 

He gave a speech about writer's block and allowing yourself to fail, read an excerpt from what will become the 8th book of the Stormlight Archive and just... He's amazing

 

It's basically my boyfriend's equivalent of Yuzuru Hanyu, and he got the best experience he could have asked for

And yes, the guy is amazing, very approachable and since we had the books in spanish, he asked me details about the translations (probably because my boyfriend literally dropped all his books after he got them signed. He was that excited hahaha and could barely speak) and stuff to see if there was any problem with the translation. It's wonderful that he cares about that kind of things too

 

[Neenah]

40 minutes ago, Hydroblade said:

Since it's the literature thread i just HAVE to share yesterday's experience here...

So, we met Brandon Sanderson yesterday...

My boyfriend and i split the whole Cosmere between us and we got all the books signed! He got his favorite one personalized (with his name and "journey before destination, life before death" and "I will protect those who cannot protect themselves").

A bunch of amazing things happened to him, but i think the cherry on top was that he got a RAFO (Read And Find Out) card after he asked Brandon something while he was signing the book. When we got out of the library a lot of people went to him to ask him what question he had asked.

 

He gave a speech about writer's block and allowing yourself to fail, read an excerpt from what will become the 8th book of the Stormlight Archive and just... He's amazing

 

It's basically my boyfriend's equivalent of Yuzuru Hanyu, and he got the best experience he could have asked for

And yes, the guy is amazing, very approachable and since we had the books in spanish, he asked me details about the translations (probably because my boyfriend literally dropped all his books after he got them signed. He was that excited hahaha and could barely speak) and stuff to see if there was any problem with the translation. It's wonderful that he cares about that kind of things too

 

Yay, you got to meet Barndon in person 

 

I've met him twice before and would really like to to do so again. He is so nice and his talks are very interesting and funny. I did make him sign many personalised books for me and my sisters and have a picture with him (twice)  

 

Now I really need to know what the question your boyfriend asked was and what the excerpt from book 8 said.. please share or I won't be able to sleep tonight  

[Hydroblade]

9 minutes ago, Neenah said:

Yay, you got to meet Barndon in person 

 

I've met him twice before and would really like to to do so again. He is so nice and his talks are very interesting and funny. I did make him sign many personalised books for me and my sisters and have a picture with him (twice)  

 

Now I really need to know what the question your boyfriend asked was and what the excerpt from book 8 said.. please share or I won't be able to sleep tonight  

Yes!! I learned so much from the opening talk! And motivated me to keep on writing after he said that when you write, the perfect idea you had in your mind suddenly turns into a not so perfect thing and you feel disappointed because it looked a lot better in your head i've reached that point in many of my stories but now i kinda want to pick them up again

The way he talked about failure though, it was so inspiring

 

I will definitely go and meet him again when he comes back, that bookstore has been inviting him since he began to do book tours and he said he liked it a lot and was very grateful to them because of that.

 

His question was about the Stormlight Archive and i haven't read that part yet so he didn't want to tell me the full thing, but it was something to do with bonded sprens and death. That's the one that got him the RAFO card.

The other one was, if Wayne was a Radiant, which order would he belong to? (Full answer was: Because of his personality and other things about this character, he would belong to the Edgedancers. The other orders would look at him suspiciously but he would belong to the Edgedancers.).

Another guy got a verbal RAFO and he asked if it was possible that there were more than 16 shards. (Definite no). Followup was, besides Harmony, if two shards could combine and make a new one. He got the RAFO and "they can splinter"

 

The excerpt is actually the first version of The Way of Kings, focusing on Taln. He said that in that first draft, there were no spren, no shardblades and no bridge four (HERESY!). It was about Taln waking up in a monastery. I'm sure the recording will surface sooner or later, i saw some people recording it

 

[Neenah]

1 hour ago, Hydroblade said:

Yes!! I learned so much from the opening talk! And motivated me to keep on writing after he said that when you write, the perfect idea you had in your mind suddenly turns into a not so perfect thing and you feel disappointed because it looked a lot better in your head i've reached that point in many of my stories but now i kinda want to pick them up again

The way he talked about failure though, it was so inspiring

 

I will definitely go and meet him again when he comes back, that bookstore has been inviting him since he began to do book tours and he said he liked it a lot and was very grateful to them because of that.

 

His question was about the Stormlight Archive and i haven't read that part yet so he didn't want to tell me the full thing, but it was something to do with bonded sprens and death. That's the one that got him the RAFO card.

The other one was, if Wayne was a Radiant, which order would he belong to? (Full answer was: Because of his personality and other things about this character, he would belong to the Edgedancers. The other orders would look at him suspiciously but he would belong to the Edgedancers.).

Another guy got a verbal RAFO and he asked if it was possible that there were more than 16 shards. (Definite no). Followup was, besides Harmony, if two shards could combine and make a new one. He got the RAFO and "they can splinter"

 

The excerpt is actually the first version of The Way of Kings, focusing on Taln. He said that in that first draft, there were no spren, no shardblades and no bridge four (HERESY!). It was about Taln waking up in a monastery. I'm sure the recording will surface sooner or later, i saw some people recording it

 

Thank you for the detailed answer.. Some good questions there

 

The first version of The Way of Kings was so different. I found the parts he published on his website and couldn't get through it because it really wasn't that good .. Maybe I should go look for it again. Though I am happy that we got a confirmation that there will be a Taln book, that is one story I am dying to know.

[Hydroblade]

2 minutes ago, Neenah said:

it really wasn't that good

Hahaha yeah! He said that he wrote like ten pages of just describing the architecture of ONE city and then he went "uh... this isn't working"

The excerpt was from the 2002 version of it, but the part he read, he said that it will be in what will become the 8th book of The Stormlight Archive

[kaaaaaaat]

On 11/3/2018 at 9:33 PM, dheu said:

There are a lot of posts on here (from a long time ago ) about Haruki Murakami.  To be honest, I have a love-hate relationship with his books.  For instance, I love "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (it's one of my favorite books) but many of his other books I can't get into, such as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle".  I really tried with that one, but I just couldn't appreciate it, even after making it to the end.  It combined the mundane inanity of thorough descriptions of every day actions like making spaghetti (which felt like it happened every other chapter) with such bizarre situations that I couldn't follow the thread of the book.  The most memorable part of the book for me was the story told by the officer who ended up in the well, which I still remember, even though I can barely remember what the main character did throughout the book (except make spaghetti).  "Hardboiled Wonderland" was a revelation to me.  I think I was hoping "Chronicle" would be the same.

I think my love for Murakami is more about the weirdly serene feeling I get whenever I read his books, partly because sometimes it's so bizarre that it's hard to see it happening. I can't really explain the kind of feeling it gives me, but I'd liken it to ASMR--quite soothing, though weird. I do think these days I enjoy his non-fiction more than his fiction works, though. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Underground are two very fascinating reads. Am reading Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa and it's quite interesting as well!

[dheu]

17 hours ago, kaaaaaaat said:

I think my love for Murakami is more about the weirdly serene feeling I get whenever I read his books, partly because sometimes it's so bizarre that it's hard to see it happening. I can't really explain the kind of feeling it gives me, but I'd liken it to ASMR--quite soothing, though weird. 

I can understand that, because that's how I feel reading Hardboiled Wonderland.  It is the mixture of the mundane and the bizarre that throws me off, I think.  Like in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I could not feel invested in the bizarre stuff because he would bring the story jolting back into the real world with what felt to me like overly detailed descriptions of the mundane, such as cooking ordinary meals.  My imagination would be wound up with the strange girl and the story of the man in the well, and suddenly I have to read (what felt to me like) tedious paragraphs about his normal life.  To be honest, I don't know why I had such a hard time with that book.  I tried it multiple times, gave up the first time, and finally muscled through the second time.  It just didn't grab me, and I wanted to be grabbed like I was when reading Hardboiled Wonderland.

 

Maybe I should try his non-fiction.  And I still want to read Kafka on the Shore... I started it awhile back but Real Life intruded and I haven't picked it back up again.  But that one did have the "grab" from what little I read, so here's hoping that maybe I'll add that to my tally of Murakami Books I Love.

[Louitunes]

Posting as a recommendation for those who like biographies.  "Bring on the Empty Horses" by David Niven.  Tales of the glamorous age of Hollywood from 1935 - 1960.  Errol Flynn, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Betty Bacall, Douglas Fairbanks Junior, Charles Chaplin, Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Olivia De Havilland all feature.   

 

His previous book .  "The Moon's a Balloon" about his early life is also a good read.

[BWOZWaltz]

On 11/4/2018 at 12:33 PM, dheu said:

I'm dredging this thread out of the depths of the Space Junk section, all because I want to see Yuzu's Helsinki LP but there's too many hours to go until then...  I've got to amuse myself somehow!

 

There are a lot of posts on here (from a long time ago ) about Haruki Murakami.  To be honest, I have a love-hate relationship with his books.  For instance, I love "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (it's one of my favorite books) but many of his other books I can't get into, such as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle".  I really tried with that one, but I just couldn't appreciate it, even after making it to the end.  It combined the mundane inanity of thorough descriptions of every day actions like making spaghetti (which felt like it happened every other chapter) with such bizarre situations that I couldn't follow the thread of the book.  The most memorable part of the book for me was the story told by the officer who ended up in the well, which I still remember, even though I can barely remember what the main character did throughout the book (except make spaghetti).  "Hardboiled Wonderland" was a revelation to me.  I think I was hoping "Chronicle" would be the same.

 

But I've never really been a huge fan of contemporary fiction anyway.  My tastes in books are kind of backwards.  When I was a child, I was reading books like Les Miserables, the Brothers Karamazov, and the Count of Monte Cristo.  Now that I'm an adult, I read young adult fiction.  I guess I'm just weird.  

 

 

 

I have read a few of Murakami's books and my favourite is "Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World". As my prime language is Japanese, I read Japanese books for pleasure while reading English books is more of a chore. I have never read Murakami's books in English so I don't really know how they've been translated but his writing in Japanese didn't really appeal to me. I liked HWEW because of the story's duel world aspect. I've tried to read Norwegian Wood 3 times and gave up...

 

During my school years (primary to high school), I was a keen reader. When I was seven, I used to go to the city library every Saturday with my friend. We had to take a train for one stop to get there and we went every Saturday for about 2 years or so.I was really into reading books. But since moved overseas in my twenties, I haven't been much of a reader because getting good Japanese books became rather difficult. I was into sci-fi novels at one point and read a lot of them when I was about 15 to 18yrs. Most of them were Japanese sci-fi novels. Yasutaka Tsutsui (the author who created "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"), Kazumasa Hirai, Motoko Arai, Jun Yokota, Sakyo Komatsu, Kaoru Kurimoto, and Shinichi Hoshi. I also like Miyuki Miyabe and Issui Ogawa. I like Ogawa's 'The Lord of the Sands of Time'. 

 

I was into a French author Francoise Sagan when I was about 13 somehow. I also quite liked J.D. Salinger ("A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in his book "Nine Stories" is well known among Japanese Manga fans of Akimi Yoshida). Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence", Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme". If I go to a book shop now, I'd probably end up looking at books of Penguin Books. I've also read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in junior high school library. I've read all these books in Japanese and I'm thinking maybe I should go back and read them in English now. Oh I also liked Clive Barker's books. They're popular in Japan.

 

Fantasy, mystery, sci-fi, and classic literature is my kind of books I guess. 

[dheu]

I wish I could read Japanese novels.  I read some Japanese and have been working to improve my understanding, but a full book is beyond me at the moment.  I wish I understood more, because there are so many books by Japanese authors that never see an English translation.  I'm impressed and envious that you can read in both (even if English books are a chore for you).   The biggest factor for me is the kanji....

 

Fantasy, sci-fi, and classic literature are my favorites too.  I need to get "The Lord of the Sands of Time", that looks interesting! 

 

 

[harley874512]

I have read classroom of the elite novel here and I recommend to read this novel. This is one of the best.

[monchan]

I bought 2 Jp novels to entertain myself in this endless social distancing and finished them in only 2 days. One book is about "cooking healing the soul" that made someone hate cooking like me actually want to learn how to cook Jpn food , the other is about a "dream detective". I didn't know before buying it but the dream detective book turned out to be quite famous, Paprika. After reading I feel the idea is so similar to movie Inception and not surprised the latter was inspired by the anime based on this book.

Must say it is dark and pretty disturbing. The characters all have distorted personalities that make me have mixed feelings even for the protagonists, and the story got too surreal towards the end for my taste. At the same time the idea of a dream machine and psychoanalytic theory thru out this book is mind-blowing (the author built the story on solid psycho knowledge, particularly Dream theory by Freud, that made Inception just like a game online).

[Sayu93]

I wish they would release the whole recording to purchase for charity. I mean it's Andy Serkis Reading the Hobbit and doing a damn fine Job at it imo.

https://youtu.be/YSeVHqp2eQA